The proper use of Anger

Sept. 4, 2011

Albertville

Matt. 18:15

 

What do you do when someone really offends you? Well, if you are human and you have flesh and blood, you get angry. Well then what do you do next? Again, if you are human and you have flesh and blood, the next thing that comes to mind is retaliation. Retaliation is usually the first child born of anger. And it comes in many different shapes and forms. It might come in the form of violence; it might come in the form of a blistering string of words; it might come in the form of gossip aimed to discredit the offending person in the eyes of others. It might even come in the form of silence. You simply shut down and in your anger refuse to speak or even acknowledge the existence of this one who has hurt you.

There’s a lot of things we do to retaliate against the people who hurt and offend us, but the intent is always the same: to somehow make them pay for what they’ve done or said or thought. And it is this retaliation, this offspring of anger that makes life in the world so very tiresome

Some propose that the problem is anger itself, that if we eliminate and prevent anger that we will have a solution to the problem. But anger is not really the problem. It’s what you do with the anger that can be the problem. There are actually times when anger is called for and is the correct response. For instance, we are told that God the Father, at times, becomes angry. Likewise, Jesus, his son expressed anger on a number of occasions. Remember when he tossed the money-changers out of the temple? We know that Jesus was not a sinner, and so his anger was not sinful. It is possible to have anger and not be sinful about it. It’s like everything else in the world, its about what you do with it when you have it. Paul kind of hits on this in his letter to the Ephesians. He says, “Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. 26 Be angry and do not sin; (Eph. 4:25-26) He didn’t say “anger is sin”, he said do not sin in your anger. So again, we must conclude that it is possible to be angry, but not in a sinful way. Anger is not the problem, its what you do with the anger that can make it problem.

You know when we were called to faith in Christ Jesus, it was not part of our conversion to have all of our human emotions stripped away from us. Christians are not called by God to be flat-liners and stoics who never react strongly about anything. That’s not Christianity. God has given us a broad palate of emotions as part of who we are. His goal has never been to eliminate the emotions, but rather to purify them so that they might serve the purpose for which he gave them to us: and that includes anger.

In today's Gospel Lesson, Matthew 18, we find an example of the proper way for anger to be used. Jesus says, "If your brother sins against, you, go and show him his fault, Just between the two of you." Some one hurts you, and of course your going to get angry. That’s the natural response. That’s your God-given response. And it’s not wrong for you to be angry that someone has hurt you. It’s what you do with the anger that is important. And Jesus says that when someone hurts us, we must go to them and explain to them how they hurt us. Even though the affront seems obvious to you, its not always so obvious to them. They cannot read your mind. They do not know your heart. They do not have a direct connection to your nerve endings and your feelings. You must try to connect up with them in a helpful manner, so that they can know and understand what they have done.

You see we Christians are supposed to agree with one another that sin is our common enemy. Sin kills, sin ruins lives, sin damns people. We can't simply act like it is nothing and hope it will go away. We must rightfully get angry at the destructive power of sin and work at over coming it. So we go to our brother and show him his fault.

But that's not always so easy is it. We’d rather run away from them instead of going to them. Tell that to the Lord. He knows a little bit about the difficulty of going to the brother who offends you. All of humanity was the offending brother in his case. The whole human race had spurned his love; trampled on his gifts; maligned his very being. And yet he did not run away. He came to us. He came to us the offending brothers that we were. He came to us in Jesus Christ. And at the cross of Christ God made two things abundantly clear: Firstly that God is angry over sin; and secondly that he wants to redeem and restore sinners to himself. He came to us to deal with the sin that stood between us and him. And he still comes to us with the exact same purpose in the word as it is preached. And through the sacraments as they are received. We have a Lord who keeps coming to us with the goal of addressing our sins against him so that we can be forgiven and thereby remain in fellowship with him.

So when he asks you to go the the brother who sins against you and show him his fault with the goal of winning him over, he is simply asking you to carry on with what he has been doing in your life for all these years. He wants you to remain in fellowship with your brothers even as he remains in fellowship with you.

It is right for you to get angry at sin even as God is angry at sin, but don’t forget the goal. The goal is not for you to “blow off some steam” or “take out your aggression” or even “to make them pay”. Your goal is not to punish your brother for what he has done to you. Your goal as the text says, is to win your brother back to you, to restore your friendship and fellowship. You must be angry at the sin while at the same time valuing the relationship that the sin now threatens. Your goal is to come to the point where you are applying forgiveness to this person and you and he are restored and strengthened. This is the right thing to do when you are angered.

But with that said, there may be times, when that is not the right thing to do. Do you remember when Jesus said “If someone hits you on the right cheek, you should turn to him the other cheek also.” For the longest time, I found this to be quite confusing and I bet you have too. On the one hand, he tells us to go to the brother, to confront him when he hurts us, but then on the other hand he says we should turn the other cheek. So which approach is the correct approach? Confrontation or silent suffering? When should I confront? And when should I suffer in silence. To answer that, we need only to remember the goal. The goal is to win the brother.

Sometimes, those who hurt us are so blinded that they are hoping for a confrontation with you so they can let you have it all the more. In those cases a response will only gratify and feed their desire to mix it up with you. In that case, turning the other cheek is definitely the course of action. You can channel your anger into random acts of kindness. As paul says in Romans “if your enemy is hungry, feed his; if he is thirsty give him something to drink, in so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” In other words, you will frustrate his wickedness with your goodness. You will overcome his evil with your goodness. Let the contrast between you and him be shown for what it actually is. This will not only take all of the fun out of it for him, but it might possibly lead him to question his whole philosophy of life. Many outright antagonists have been won for the Lord by the patient endurance of God’s people.

So if the person already understands such things as sin, grace, and forgiveness and the like, usually, the best approach is to go to the brother when he offends you. They’ll understand what your doing because that’s part of the Christian life. On the other hand if this christian view of life seems to be foreign or perhaps forgotten by the one who hurts you, turning the other cheek might be the best way to get their attention.

In both cases, you will feel some anger welling up inside you; that’s to be expected. But you should be angry in the way that God is angry. Angry at what sin does to human beings. Angry at how sin destroys what would otherwise be so good. Angry at what sin has caused another human being to do to you. In your mind, separate the sin from the person. Imagine what the person could be if they were not so afflicted, and ask yourself what would be the best approach in helping them. That’s what God did, as he regarded our race. He sent Jesus because he couldn’t stop thinking about what we could be without our sins. We must think about others in the same way. AMEN